The mountain is falling and the pebbles made from its crushing weight race to me and pile around my toes.
The mountain is breaking and the stones that couldn’t be made any smaller roll over the pebbles onto my feet, digging their jagged edges into my skin.
The mountain is crumbling and rocks form hills around me so I won’t be able to move forward when I come to my senses and regain the use of my muscles.
The mountain is split in two and the boulders race towards me, some stuck in the field of their weaker brethren, others flying past me, a few set to collide and I raise my arms but they bounce and land somewhere behind me, some stopping, others continuing on their incessant way.
The mountain is falling and now its bulk towers over me as it loses its balance and I am trapped against this wall of rock that came to rest against my body and in my mouth and in my nostrils and in my eyes and in my ears and I can’t go that direction but the mountain is falling and the mountain is falling and the mountain is falling…
I am the rock in the avalanche and as I grope behind myself, I realize I parted the waters and the air behind me is clear of disaster.
I step back.
The mountain crashes before me, its great bulk pulverizing all that came from it until lesser parts are dust and least parts are less than dust.
I face the mountain, trembling.
“The way is clear, the way is clear,” booms a voice around me.
“The way is gone,” I say, “The mountain has fallen.”
“The way is clear, the way is clear,” the voice says again as if I’d said nothing. “The mountain is gone.”
The mountain sinks into the ground and the grass grows over it, the trees sprout and reach into tall, spindling birch only to fall and die and decompose as new trees grow, over and over until the dirt covers the stone and there is nothing left of the mountain.
“The way is clear, the way is clear,” says the voice.
“The way is not clear,” I say. “The forest has obliterated it.”
“The way is clear, the way is clear.” I wonder where the voice gets its information. “The forest is ready.”
The forest dies without animals, carbon dioxide used up and nutrients leached from the soil, and the wind bleaches the fallen trunks, petrifies them.
“The way is clear, the way is clear,” says the voice.
“There is no way,” I say. “There’s nothing.”
“The way is clear, the way is clear. The mountain is building.”
The petrified logs shift with the changing seasons as the ground shifts, shift with the winds that dance through, shift with the earth as it moves, restless, beneath them.
The petrified logs clump together and entwine their branches until there is no beginning or end, they hold together, huddled against the cold and the rain.
They form the mountain.
“There is no way,” I say. “The mountain must fall.”
The mountain is falling.
I stamp on the ground, done with this game, and grow until I am a giant, taller than the mountain could ever be, taller than the sun is high and the world is a speck beneath me.
“Where do I go,” I cry, “When I don’t know the way I’m going?”
I lift my face to gaze into the eyes of my Father. He reaches for me and I let him take me into his arms to hold his adult daughter close to his chest.
He takes the world-speck between his thumb and forefinger and quietly smashes it to nothing between them.
“You had a whole world to learn in,” he says. “What did you find?”
“Nothing goes the way I want it to,” I say into his shoulder.
“That’s not true.” His voice is gentle and he holds me out to bend down and look into my eyes. I choose to meet his, though mine are downcast. “What did you learn?”
“There’s no way out,” I say. “There’s the mountain and the rockslide, the forest and death, and none of them are right. None of them are real.”
“What is real?” he asks, casually. “Someone once asked me that of truth. What is the mountain?”
“Pain,” I say, and close my eyes to hold him tight again and nestle my face into his shoulder.
“What is the rock field?”
“Fear and confusion.”
“Why did you step back?”
I pause. “I didn’t want to be buried.”
“Good. What is the forest?”
“Life.”
“But it died.”
I sigh. He sits, and I rest on his lap as I think.
“It’s me.”
“You think you’re missing something?”
“Maybe? I know I’m not, but what if I think I am? What if I’m operating out of this assumption that I have nothing but plants and all this oxygen but no one to breathe it?”
He doesn’t answer, but gently asks again, “What is the forest?”
“Nothing. It’s a lie.”
“What kind of lie?”
“But isn’t it some sort of truth, though? Because it did live, for a little.”
“What is truth?” But he says this seriously.
“You.” I pull out my head to look at him again, speaking with the earnestness of a child concerned that her parent doesn’t know something terribly important.
“What is truth?”
Read part two.
